I held the page to the window of Tolliver and Price and read the second signature once more. Blue black fountain pen, with the long tail on the y that I would have known anywhere. Walter James Farrell, my father. Dated the day before my wedding. The deed conveyed a lot on Main Street in Farmville, one hundred feet by two hundred, not to Gordon, not to the two of us, but to Suzette Farrell Ashby, a married woman, as her sole and separate property. The shop had stood upon my ground for thirty nine years.
“Mama,” Chip said, “the lawyer of Daddy sent me the envelope by mistake, because both of us are Mr. Ashby in his files. I read it three times, and then I called the courthouse for a certified copy. It is real. It is in Book 214, page 77.” He tapped the open checkbook on my desk. “And this is the other thing. The last six stubs are in the hand of Kaylee. She has been writing checks to cash every Friday since March. Forty one hundred dollars a week.” I looked at the loops of those letters. I looked at the sum. I picked up my father fountain pen and held it like a candle.
The next morning, Chip drove me to Lynchburg. Mrs. Dabney read the deed with her glasses on the end of her nose and a pencil tucked behind her ear. When she looked up, she was smiling for the first time since I had met her. “My dear,” she said, “your father gave you a wedding present that has been sitting in a book for thirty nine years waiting for you to read it. The business is in your husband name. The ground under it is yours. He cannot sell it. He cannot borrow against it. He has no right to a single brick without your permission.”
She went further. The papers that Gordon had signed in the divorce case, she said, listed no real property of any kind in my name. That was a false statement, under oath, and a judge would not like it. She called the clerk of the court in Farmville and had the page read aloud over the phone, and I listened with my hand pressed flat on the cold glass of her desk. The clerk said it was strange; nobody had pulled that book since the Reagan administration. Mrs. Dabney said, “Then it has been waiting for exactly the right woman.”
A father who loves his daughter will sometimes build her a house she does not know she has.
At noon on Friday, I walked across Main Street in my blue dress. The bell over the door of the shop rang as it has rung for thirty nine years, and the girl behind the phones looked up with the face of a rabbit. Gordon stood at the counter in his work shirt with a pencil behind his ear. I laid the certified copy of the deed on the counter before him, and on top of it my father pen. “Good afternoon, Gordon,” I said pleasantly. “I am your landlord.” He read it. I watched the color leave his face like water leaving a tub.
He said it must be a mistake. He said it was an old paper from another world. I said it was recorded in the Book of the county, signed by my father, and that Mrs. Dabney would be delighted to explain it to him over lunch. Chip stepped forward and laid the gray checkbook beside the deed. Kaylee made a small sound. She was only thirty eight, with a round soft face, and she looked at the stubs and then at the man she had followed across a parking lot, and the whole painted structure of her loyalty came down.
“He told me to write them,” she said, in a thin voice. “Every Friday. He said it was for a special account for the two of us. He paid me in envelopes. He said Suzette would never find out because she did not know how to read a checkbook.” She began to cry into her hands. I felt no triumph, only a kind of tired pity, the sort one feels for a girl who has been fed a story. Gordon said, “Suzette, be reasonable.” I looked at him for a long time. “I was reasonable for thirty nine years,” I said. “That is how we got here.”
The case was heard in September. The judge, a plain spoken woman of sixty, read the deed and the false affidavit and the stubs, and she did not raise her voice. Gordon was ordered to pay the back rent on the lot, calculated from the first day of 1986, and a penalty for the false oath. He bought the ground from me at a fair price set by an appraiser, four hundred ten thousand dollars, in order to keep his shop. Kaylee testified for the state, and was allowed to repay what she had taken in monthly sums. She sent me a card with a pressed violet. I kept it.
Chip came to my apartment over the florist that Sunday with a bouquet of roses, a late birthday present, the same kind he sends every year. He stood in the doorway and said that he had been a coward. He said that he had hung up on me because I had made him look at his father, and that he could not stand it. I took the roses. I put them in a jar of water on the table. “Come and sit down,” I said. “I will make tea. We have thirty nine years to talk about, and I am only getting started.”
I bought the florist building in November, with my share of the money, and the apartment came with it. Mr. Price offered me a partnership at the firm in the spring, and I said yes before he had finished the sentence. The sign on the door now reads Tolliver, Price and Farrell, because I took my maiden name back with great ceremony, on a Thursday, at the county clerk, in my father pen. My clients are mostly women. They arrive with shoe boxes of receipts and shaking hands, and I say what my daddy said to me.
Sign nothing you have not read. It is on a card above my desk in the handwriting of the old tax man of Farmville, and it faces the window where I can see the shop across the street. Gordon waves sometimes. I wave back. In the top drawer, wrapped in the handkerchief, lies the black pen with its gold band, and in the drawer below it a copy of Book 214, page 77. I read it often. It is the only love letter I ever received that was recorded at the courthouse.
